Scientists are one step closer to solving a 100-year-old mystery about cosmic rays in our universe.
Astrophysicists have been trying to understand where the charged particles traveling at nearly the speed of light and bombarding the Earth come from.
These particles are incredibly difficult to track. The galaxy’s magnetic fields can deflect the particles during their journey through space because of their charge, making it almost impossible to know where they came from.
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But another type of particle, called a neutrino, could solve this mystery. Neutrinos are neutral particles produced by cosmic rays. Because they have very little mass and do not interact with matter, they can help determine their origins.
One of these neutrinos was found in 2017. Using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory deep in the South Pole, scientists traced the particle to blazar TXS 0506 +056, a galactic nucleus fed by a supermassive black hole.
Using a catalog of objects that scientists believe are blazars, as well as data obtained by IceCube, they think they’ve found a subset of blazars that emit these neutrinos, said Clemson University’s Associate Professor Marco Ajello. They say the odds of this being a coincidence are less than one in a million.
“We had a hint at the time (in 2017) and now we have proof,” Ajello said.
“For the first time, the results provide indisputable observational evidence that subsamples of PeVatron blazars are extragalactic neutrino sources and thus cosmic ray accelerators,” added Sara Buson of the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in Bavaria.
The researchers say that discovering these neutrinos is an important milestone in astrophysics and that studying blazars could enable scientists to find out why they make good accelerators. Understanding other cosmic “messengers” such as cosmic rays, neutrinos and gravitational waves will give astrophysicists a broader basis for studying the universe than just using light.
“It’s like feeling, hearing and seeing at the same time. We will understand much better,” Ajello said.
